The proliferation of electronic office systems creates a need for exchanging and storing information. One reason for this proliferation is the popularity of Electronic mail (E-mail) networks. Electronic mail networks permit a network of communicating text and word processors to transmit documents (e.g. text, graphic, facsimile, voice, etc.) from one end-user to another. The current state of the art permits a sender to transmit an audio message to a recipient or embed an audio message or music into documents. This capability allows a network user to personalize documents and communicate using the power of voice or music in sound annotated messages, electronic mail or multimedia presentations. Sound files may be depicted in documents as icons resembling microphones. A user may playback messages using sound enabling hardware or with microphones and speaker devices plugged into a workstation.
Electronic mail networks now permit inter-vendor networking of voice messages between different mail systems thereby increasing the reach of network users. Voice messages may be delivered to a recipient, marked with a time and date stamped. The voice messages may then be delivered immediately, overnight or scheduled for delivery up to one year in advance. Electronic mail networks supporting voice processing may support multiple applications such as voice mail, voice response, fax and electronic mail. As used in this specifications, voice processing is an underlying technology which consists of voice mail, auto attendant, interactive voice response, text-to-speech, audient and speech recognition.
Electronic mail networks enable wide spread user communications encompassing many nationalities. Recipients of voice messages may receive audio messages in a language that is not native to the recipient. While prior art mechanisms have addressed converting a text message to a recipient's native language or one computer machine code to another (e.g., Revisable File Text (RFT) to ASCII), they have not addressed transmission of audio messages and the word translation losses incurred when the audio messages are translated. Word translation losses occur for many reasons but most losses occur due to the dialect of a language. Generally, automatic language translation systems have an accuracy of between 60-80 percent for translating scientific and technical materials. However, translating accuracy suffers substantially when handling conversational sentences with their often obscure grammatical structure. Conversion/Translation of an audio message from an originator's language may produce words that are of a dubious nature in a recipient's native language. Even when words are the closest match that a language translation mechanism can perform, they may still be unacceptable. Another problem surfaces when the originator of an audio message needs to retain a verification copy of the transmitted document. While the originator may keep a copy of the original document, a translated version of the transmitted document is not available making it impossible to verify what the recipient has viewed. Prior art systems have not provided mechanisms that allow originators of audio messages to specify the conditions for which language translation should occur. A translation mechanism should allow a user transmitting a message to edit the original message before transmitting it if words are used which have no direct translation or which are unacceptable in the recipient's language. Also, the recipient of an audio translation may need to determine the acceptability of the translation. A mechanism is needed that notifies the recipient of an audio message that a language translation has occurred with information loss.
Consequently, a technique is needed that detects information loss when a message/document is translated and conveys this loss to the originator of the message as well as the recipient.